


Crash

by RacheIDuncan



Series: Survivor [4]
Category: Agent Carter (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-07
Updated: 2015-03-07
Packaged: 2018-03-16 19:07:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3499559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RacheIDuncan/pseuds/RacheIDuncan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set immediately after 'Rant'</p>
<p>Peggy wants to take Angie dancing tonight.</p>
<p>Deeper insight into Peggy's backstory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crash

It's when the door closes behind Peggy, all dressed prim and proper in her skirt and shirt combination that Angie has found herself missing -- around the house, Peggy hardly wore anything more than an old t-shirt and pants -- does Angie finally deflate.

The business card, Matthew's business card, Peggy's brother's business card, is still placed on the side, next to the broken apple core. Angie picks it up, folds it around her fingers before she taps it on the counter. With a heavy sigh and a knot in the tip of her neck, Angie gazes down at the card, tries to make sense of the words, tries to keep them still. With a crinkle at her forehead and her mother's voice in her ears, you're such a stupid little girl Angie, such a stupid little girl, Angie spells out the words. 

It takes her ten minutes but she does it. 

**MATTHEW JAMES CARTER.**  
**CRIMINAL LAWYER.**

So Peggy's brother is a big shot defence attorney, eh? Angie wrinkles her nose, there's no way they can be related, right? There's somethin' fierce in her Peggy, the good kinda fierce. But in this Matthew guy, it's the cowardly type fierce. Angie could bet her own life that he didn't ever shoot a guy in the war. He probably never even left his country. 

She never did get why so many people called men the heroes of the family. 

Angie tears the card. 

Turning around in the stool, what Angie sees is a rhubarb pie, cool now, out by the oven. She smiles fondly to herself and thinks about Peggy. Last she saw her before all this she was curled up in bed, sleeping all soft like under the many, many pillows. She had this cute little frown on her face when Angie had to pull away and get ready to leave. She mumbled something unintelligible but her hands reached out to try and grab her. Infantile almost, that's how she looked. Angie had to slide a pillow from her side of the bed into Peggy's arms just because. 

Peggy doesn't have any pictures of her younger self, to Angie's knowledge, and it's a real shame. Angie reckons Peggy was a cute baby, an brash teenager, a wild but still sexy young adult.

And what thinking about this does, what it does is make Angie let the bad thoughts in. She considers what Matthew said, about her Peggy. Town whore. So many partners. 'Pub' fights. Uncle Samson. 

She doesn't realise her hands are clenched until she feels that throbbing in her palms from where her nails dig in. 

We all have skeletons in our closets, Angie supposes, but that doesn't mean she can't help Peggy clean them out. After all, she did help that time she came home and found Peggy trying to move an almost corpse from the sofa. 

So Angie simply sighs again before pulling herself up. She slides the business card and the apple core into the trash can and goes about getting herself a slice of rhubarb pie. 

It's not that nice but Peggy made it so it tastes like love. 

Angie forgets she even had an audition.

/ /

"Much more professional, come on, Carter, get in."

Peggy purses her lips at that, she'd barely had time to paint them what with Thompson rushing her to look more reputable. Her mind, still reeling from everything that'd happened in the prior hour, was aching. She very nearly forgot her shoes. 

Not her gun though, that'd be strapped to her thigh long before she even put on her skirt. 

Thompson gives no explanation as Peggy settles down into the back seat of his cruiser. Sousa is bunched up shotgun and there are files in his hands. He flashes her a look through the rear view mirror and Peggy allows herself to swallow hard. She catches her own reflection, her own neck, and promptly flicks her hair to cover up the lovebites Angie left last night. He smiles at her after that. 

The car, it picks up speed and Peggy feels too anxious. She thinks about Angie alone, she thinks about Jarvis dumping her brother's unconscious body at a hostel in Harlem. She thinks about brother. 

Peggy tries to live her life without any regret. She's seen first hand in the war what it had done to some people. Why she remembers vividly the report of a sergeant taking a plane in the middle of the night. He'd crashed into a mountain because the screaming in his head was too loud. Steve had helped with this, he never did anything that wasn't right, not really. And if he did, if by some weird date of the world, he did something that was morally grey? He wouldn't regret it. He'd say it was just what had to be done. 

Peggy doesn't regret her body count, her losses, her loves. But what she does regret is 1939. 

It was an April, not far from her birthday, and England was rife with fear. There'd been echoed from the capital about the prospect of a second Great War -- Peggy hadn't been born for the first but her grandmother had told her stories, terrible stories; she knew if there were to be another, she'd fight like her grandfather did, how her father did. She was at a pub, a local haunt of hers, and all the discussion was about how Hitler had marched his troops in Czechoslovakia last month, about how he was going to take reign of the rest of Europe if something didn't stop him. Exhausted of the conversation, not that it was directed to her of course, it was just tedious white noise, Peggy downed a last long sip of beer before calling it a night. 

She'd only bruised her knuckles that night. 

Her cuts from days before were fast healing too.

Thompson corners too quickly and her body is pulled across the back seat. She rights herself and through the rear view he asks, "You alright, Carter?"

"Mostly," She says, her voice sounds thick with nostalgia. She clears her throat, says, "Perhaps I'd be more comfortable if I knew why exactly you chose to disrupt my Sunday afternoon, considering the simple fact that I don't work for the SSR anymore."

Thompson just gives her this look that strikes ice within her. It’s a look like he knows, he knows. But all he does is say, eyes burning on her, “We got a lead on Underwood. Thought you’d enjoy the ride.”

And he goes back to driving. 

Peggy swallows hard and lowers herself further into the seat. Sousa, wordlessly, thumbs through some files.

She’d returned home, rather late than she’d thought, and Ruth was crying. Peggy was no stranger to Ruth, not at all, they’d grown quite friendly over the near year that she’d been dating her brother. Her grandmother was tucked away in bed and Ruth was just sitting at the dining room table; she’d looked up when Peggy wandered in, eyes all hopeful and kohl smudged. Stonewashed blue, the kind that Peggy found herself falling victim to more often than not.

A conversation had happened. Matthew was out gambling again, trying to collect the millions that Peggy just refused to give him. Peggy had made tea, but they’d both forgotten to drink it. Ruth had this look about her eyes, of a realisation perhaps, or something else. When the words fell short, and Peggy glanced up at the old grandfather clock in the corner, Ruth had reached out with these hands that were so soft and so gentle, and touched her jaw.

“Rouge, little, Margaret,” She had said. “Why is it that these cuts and bruises make you seem more beautiful?”

Peggy hadn’t instigated it, no, not like Ruth had said the next morning when Matthew found them. It was Ruth who’d pressed lips to lip and it was Ruth who’d guided Peggy to her own room and stripped her bare.

Peggy just couldn’t say no. 

You see, Peggy could never keep still, she still struggles. When she was younger, she needed to constantly be doing something. She needed to run, she needed to punch. She needed adrenaline to survive. It was wild and it was rash and she became known as a whirlwind of catastrophe. But those hours with Ruth, with those long fingers sliding between her legs and those lips on her chest, Peggy found calm. Of course she’d searched for it before, in men with big muscles and nice hair cuts, but that stillness barely lasted for the few minutes it took them to finish. 

Her kiss with Steve had felt like an eternity of tranquility. 

Her kisses with Angie had sedated her, she still hadn’t woken up. 

Infatuation was a fool’s game Peggy had learned. But then again, she’d always had a foolish side to her. 

“So, Carter,” Thompson says, jarring her from her thoughts. “You finally get hitched to Stark or somethin’? Always knew you and him were too close.” He’s smug and Peggy thinks she hates him.

Her grandmother's crucifix chokes her. 

“No, I’m afraid there’s nothing go on between Howard and I,” Peggy forces out. “There never has been, not that it’s any of your business, Agent Thompson. Howard has and always be just a friend.”

Thompson smirks, “You keep telling yourself that, Carter.” Another sharp turn. Peggy doesn’t move this time. “Soon enough, you’ll be just like the other pathetic women.” 

Peggy doesn’t listen to him. Instead, what she thinks about is being six years old. With curled hair and God and Jesus in her mind, little six year old Peggy didn’t understand what was happening when her uncle---...

Thirteen years later and she was the town whore. There’s a reason she’s never fell into bed with Howard, a sort of gentle conditioning out of her past. A repression. It’s why in the war, besides Steve because Steve was special and what he made her feel wasn’t dirty like everyone before, she only ever danced.

Her first night with Howard, they were sharing a bunker out in France. It was 1940, Pearl Harbour hadn’t happened but Stark Industries was supplying the allies with weapons. The SSR didn’t exist yet but an underground organisation that became the beginnings of it had found Peggy one night in London and trained her up. She was part of the team founded to ensure Howard’s safe return back to the US when he’d finished fixing up some planes. (Allied mechanics just didn’t understand how all this technology worked, apparently.) 

They had separate beds and a record player. Smuggled wine was passed between them. It was hardly the time for joy and merriment but Peggy was just so tired. The war was more horror than she could have imagined and Howard somehow had remained an optimist in all of it. We’ll pull through, Peg, good guys win, bad guys lose, it just takes some time gettin’ there. 

They were sat on the floor, backs against Peggy’s bed. He’d handed her the wine bottle again, this time with lingering fingers and a fondness in his eye. Peggy was no stranger to the glimmer in a man’s eye when she walked into the room; it wasn’t even the first time she’d seen it from Howard. It tickled her, really, made her laugh. It’d been so long since she’d so much as kissed another person that the notion of teasing Howard didn’t sound as ludicrous as it would have done in daylight. 

What Peggy did then, was sip slowly from the wine bottle, letting her lips suck on the rim for just a moment. Putting it down on the ground, she turned more into Howard, pressed herself tight against him. With an excitement in his eyes, his hands found her waist and tugged her closer. Peggy, her lips came to his but didn’t touch. A breath away.

Howard had leaned forward, only to be stopped by her finger on his lips. She dragged it down, his lower lip rolling under finger, and kept going and going until it stopped at his belt buckle. His hands squeezed her waist.

In a fluid motion, Peggy pressed her lips to his cheek and stood up. Gazing down at him she said, “Goodnight, Howard,” before she left the room, a smirk on her face and a cigarette in her fingers. 

She gave him a half hour before she went back, throat thick with smoke and no regret in her step, and she found him, pantless, passed out asleep in his bed.

Peggy smiles wistfully at the memory, the city passing by rapidly through the window of Thompson’s car. She remembers exactly how Angie’s face wrinkled when she’d relayed that story to her. (She hadn’t intended to reveal anything about Howard and ‘The Great Tease of 1940’ as he so called it, but Angie hadn’t stopped pestering her about whether something had happened between them and, well, she can be very persuasive sometimes.) Angie didn’t seem to care though, Angie herself had gotten up to a fair few things before and during the war, Peggy had discovered. Though exclusively women, Angie had her own little list, nothing as extensive as Peggy’s, no, Angie was too pure for that.

Angie was more of a tease, you see, wearing her skirt a little too short so that she’d work some extra tips, pressing her lips to the collar bones of patrons in underground lesbian bars to get a free drink. Angie had barely gone all the way before Peggy, unless you count Suzie who ‘bought me violets when we were sixteen ‘course I had to stash them somewhere secret because if my ma had found them...She was so nice though, Peg, she was really somethin’, I loved her a lot’.

She’s glad, Peggy thinks, that she’s essentially the only one who really gets to see Angie. After everything that she’s been through, all of these terrible things, she’s still the most beautiful, the most lovely person Peggy could have ever hoped to want to spend her life with. Selfish, she knows, but the sight of Angie rolling her head back and hissing out her name is something Peggy never wants anyone else to see. She never wants anyone else to taste Angie’s lips, feel her skin. 

However, what Peggy can feel building up within her was this sort of anxiety. She houses this feeling that since her brother, since Matthew had gone and raked up all of her past actions, Angie perhaps doesn’t look at her the same anymore. 

Maybe it’s a feeling of distrust, maybe she thinks that Peggy could go back there, to that lifestyle. She would never but it’s conceivable that Angie doesn’t truly know that. Or maybe Angie thinks that she’s maybe just another conquest in Peggy’s notebook, another notch on her bedpost.

But she isn’t. Angie isn’t a quick shag in an alleyway in a desperate attempt to feel something other chaos. Angie is serenity is what Peggy’s been looking for her whole life. She won’t let Matthew’s revelations spoil all that, no. Forever is what she wants with Angie. Forever is what she will have with Angie.

She’ll tell her this later. Tonight. Take her out to dinner, all dressed up nice. Peggy’ll say I love you and give her a ring. Not a proposal, no, it can’t be a proposal. But a promise, that she will love her until the end of time.

Peggy thinks that after that they can to one of those bars, they can go dancing. She’ll have the band play something slow, she wouldn’t want------

/ / 

Angie all but falls through the front door with the grocery bags towering in her arms. Howard had given them everything but what Angie refuses to do is let someone else do her grocery shopping. How she’s supposed to know that the guy he sends is gonna get the right kinda cheese for her pasta? It’s a very important part of the recipe. It can throw off the whole taste of the dish if you get that pre-sliced stuff. 

So Howard had complied, so long as he can send a car to run her to the old store across town. Angie doesn’t mind, lets her think about how it might be if she makes it. When she makes it, like Peggy keeps telling her.

Even with the weight of these bags, Angie can’t frown at the thought of Peggy. She wonders idly as, with a flourish of her hips, she shuts the front door, what Peggy would like for dinner tonight. Of course, that’s only if she’s back at a normal human time. But Angie feels like she has to do something, really show Peggy that she doesn’t care about any of that stuff Matthew said. Yeah, she’d brew some of Peggy’s favourite leaf tea, make her something from that exotic foods book, dress in something nice and spend the rest of the night showing her how much she loves her.

Angie bites her lower lip to suppress a grin, she’d wear something red, Peggy’s favourite---

“Miss Martinelli.”

The bags of groceries fall to the floor.

Jarvis, he stands as she walks in. Takes of his hat and holds it against his chest. Angie doesn’t even need him to say anything, she can tell from that look on his face that something’s happened.

She swallows hard.

He says, chokes out, stumbles out, “Mr Stark is there now. I tried calling but you didn’t answer. For the better, I suppose.” Jarvis steps towards Angie in a pace that’s almost too slow. Hands come to rest on her shoulders. “There was an...incident involving the car Agent Thompson was driving and another, missing vehicle. One suspects it was Dottie Underwood--”

“Peggy?” She forces out.

Jarvis looks away, then brings her tight into an embrace, “She’s badly injured, Miss Martinelli, they’re unsure if---”

“Don’t, don’t you dare,” Angie growls, pushes him away. She hits at his chest, over and over. “Don’t you say that she’s gonna come home, don’t you say it!” He wraps his arms around her while her knees buckle. “I wanna see her, Fancy,” She coughs out. “I wanna hold her hand and make it better.”

“I know, Miss Martinelli, I know,” He whispers gently, stroking her hair. “I’ll take you to her. We’ll go, right now.”

Angie nods her head, “She’s gonna be okay?”

Jarvis doesn’t answer as he walks her to the car.

/ / 

“I got the best doctors in the world looking after you, Pegs, you’re gonna get through this. You got your dame to think about, Peggy, I might swoop in there and get if you’re not around to keep me away,” Howard’s voice is thick, heavy. He leans down and kisses Peggy’s knuckles. “God, Peg, you can’t leave me, you can’t. You’re the only one who can keep me in check, you know, the only one who can get me to listen.”

Peggy’s hooked up to a lot of wires, there’s a lot of beeping echoing about the room. What Howard feels like is useless. All the money in the world and all he can do is pray that his best friend pulls through this. 

He’s never been one for medicine, the biology of machines makes much more sense to him that the biology of humans. I mean sure, Howard’s a fan of a certain aspect but medicine? Things like that confuse him to hell. So when the doctors he’s hired start to talk in all this fancy lingo about what’s going on in Peggy all he can do is ask them to dumb it down. Make it simple, doc. It’s Peggy.

Some cracked ribs, some pulled ligaments. Internal bleeding.

They don’t know much about her head yet, beside the giant cut on her forehead. 

If it was anyone else, hell if it was Steve Rogers himself, Howard wouldn’t bet on them waking up again. But this is Peggy Carter. Peggy who, right after Steve went down, got her machine gun and charged through all those HYDRA soldiers; she got shot in the shoulder and didn’t even mention it until two hours later and she was having a bourbon with him. I think I may have ever so slightly been shot.

Peggy’s invincible.

Peggy’s his God.

“Peggy!” 

And that’s what breaks his heart.

He turns around to see Angie falling into Jarvis. Peggy’s dame can’t stand for the shock of seeing her lover all beat up like this. Howard, just looking at that expression on Angie’s face, goddamnit to hell, he wishes he could wave his hand and make Peggy better.

Fix all this like it’s one of his stupid machines. 

Instead, all he can do is kiss Peggy’s hair, stand, and squeeze Angie’s shoulder as she takes his seat.


End file.
